Microsoft released their platform preview of their upcoming Internet Explorer Browser 9 in front of developers in a conference in Las Vegas. Microsoft is major player in the browser market. According to a research done by Net Market Share, Internet Explorer has 62 percent share whereas Firefox the next big name in browsing has 24 percent market share. And with the better speed and performance Internet Explorer 9 is hoping to get a better share.

The new Internet Explorer 9 supports HTML5 thus giving the developers more freedom to create more interactive games. With HTML5 the designers could use improved and clean codes, the consistency will also improve, the semantic value of the webpage will increase and one could display the multimedia online. In IE 9 the team had rewritten the JavaScript engine thus the system performance had become up to the par with the competing browsers like Chrome, Firefox, and Opera. The new browser is heavily dependent on hardware acceleration SVG support. Also supports DOM and CSS3.

Only a test version had released so that the developers can get a feel of the browser and provide them feedback. So the basic functions like Back button, bookmark, history, toolbars etc are missing. Microsoft has committed that they will provide the software upgrade in the next eight week.

An interesting feature which is added in the IE9 is links. These will check the speed of the internet and the browser. None of the web browsers working today have this feature. IE9 is also impressive in term of speed; the sites are loading faster then the earlier versions.

The test drive provided by the IE9 shows Speed Demos by flying objects, animated text size and map zooming. The graphic demos show falling balls and organizational charts. The increase in speed and enhanced graphic comes from the usage of graphics hardware which had accelerated the display operations.

If you want to take a quick glance on the new browser, please go-ahead as it doesn’t replace your existing browser. PC users with Windows 7 or Vista (with internet explorer can  install IE9 to their system. Unfortunately XP user can’t use them as IE9 is not compatible to XP. Microsoft had not given any time line by when the beta version of the IE9 will be released. Hopefully they will release the beta version sometime soon!!